The cost of the so-called “bathroom bill,” which bars transgender people from using restrooms that match their gender identity, could run as high as $8.5 billion and result in a loss of 185,000 jobs in the first year alone, according to the Texas Association of Business, a conservative group that is the state’s leading employer organization.

The battle over America’s bathrooms has raged into 2017, as advocates in more than half a dozen states are seeking to enact “bathroom bills” that would require people to use the facilities that correspond to their sex assigned at birth.

If North Carolina political leaders are forced by federal officials to abandon the controversial HB2 bathroom law, there’s a city a few hundred miles north with a model they could use. Washington, D.C. has officially allowed transgender people to use public restrooms based on their gender identity since 2006.

You wrote: “I have no problem with trans people of whatever biology or stage of transition in bathroom stalls, but what about locker rooms, where nudity is normal?” And Roz, the response from many readers can be summed up as follows: Relax. You have nothing to worry about.

In 2015, groups such as Campaign for Houston began a culture-wide propaganda campaign to deny transgender people basic legal protections. Enlisting the likes of former Houston Astros star Lance Berkman and pastor Ed Young, conservatives in the state leaned heavily on the “men in girls’ bathrooms” narrative.

The letter said that “a school must not treat a transgender student differently from the way it treats other students of the same gender identity,” adding that the DOJ’s interpretation is “consistent with courts’ and other agencies’ interpretations of Federal laws prohibiting sex discrimination.”

A top Republican lawmaker in North Carolina said the state would not be “bullied” by the U.S. Justice Department into meeting a Monday deadline to change a new law regulating which bathrooms transgender people can use.

Our friends the Koch brothers routinely give money to socially conservative groups to win over middle- or working-class followers otherwise not served by the family’s economic agenda. The brothers themselves have shrugged at gay marriage, saying they have no problem with it. Perhaps, just perhaps, the working-class whites targeted by culture warriors don’t really care all that much about these issues.